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Food allergy?

Our 4 month old puppy has very itchy skin and has lost furr in patchy areas where her skin is dry and irritated. We've had to put a cone on her because she itches her face and cuts herself.

After our vet had ruled out mites, fleas and fungal diseases, we have assumed its likely a food allergy. Her puppy food was good quality (Fromm Puppy Gold) but we are thinking maybe the chicken and/ or dairy in it may be the problem. We have switched her to the food our 10 month old is on, a grain free all ages food called PureVita, which only has fish for protein, and then fruits and veggies. We will see if thst helps (fingers crossed). Even our other puppy had an intolerance to chicken and grains, it gave him runny poop and increased tearing.

Has anyone had these issues with food allergies or intolerances?
Somehow BOTH our dogs (who are both otherwise very healthy) have had nutritional issues... So to us it feels all too common.

Been there...are there. Rose is allergic to pretty much any common grain or starch (corn, wheat, potatoes) and chicken and...buffalo. Yes, buffalo (???). She does tolerate oats though, thankfully, since she needs the fiber. We have her on Back to Basics Turkey and it has done the trick for her. A friend has Rose's sister, and her other Cavalier (not Rose's sister) has bad food allergies too. She switched to BtB and it has helped her dog too. She has to mail order it where she lives, but, after trying another food locally, she went back to ordering it. I promise I don't work for the company, lol, but it is the only food (short of going to a raw diet) that I have found so far that has none of the starches that make her itch, and the bonus is that it is relatively affordable (same price range as Blue, Core, etc.). Rose is 2 years old, about 17-18 lbs, and only needs 1/2 cup (plus some Merrick canned tripe- about 1tbsp and 2 tsp of oat bran). We just got done with a round of steriods and horrible hot spots, thin hair places, etc. a few weeks ago because she found some butter cookies when someone wasn't looking...*sigh*

Hope she's feeling better soon- we figured out Rose's issues by switching to the BtB, and adding in canned food that was 96% pure (chicken, tripe, buffalo, etc.) for a couple of weeks each. It usually only took a couple of days to figure out which proteins were the culprits, and the same with adding a starch back in at a time. We are still working on seeing which starches (if any) we can add back in since so many of them were "with chicken", but the butter cookie incident set us back :/ .

Good to hear we aren't the only ones! We are pretty happy with the "Pure Vita Grain Free Salmon" for our older puppy, so we have just switched her to that for now, to see if that helps the problem, then we will go from there. My only concern with the back to basics turkey is that it looks like it still contains chicken, which we are trying to avoid all together at this point (just because research shows it as being the number 1 most common culprit in food allergies in dogs). But yeah, it might be a long road trying to figure out what exactly she is, and isn't allergic to. I SOO do not want to do food trials its such a long process and it would not be fun for my poor puppy. I just feel like, if we find a food that's working, we'll just stick to it. I am hoping if we stick to high quality food with unique proteins sources, and none of the common culprits like wheat, corn and dairy, things will get better.
I will let you know how it goes!

It does still have a little chicken, I forgot about that. The duck does too. I have thought about switching to this one: http://www.backtobasicspetfood.com/d...ood_open-range that just came out because it has no chicken, but so far, she is doing okay with a little bit of chicken in her diet and after Rose's hot spot fiasco and Emma's pancreatitis, I'm taking a break from the food circus! :P I do wonder if I switched all the chicken out if she would no longer need the oat bran. I'm doing a few common ingredient food trials so I can get low fat treats that both Emma and Rose can have (brown rice, sweet potato, etc.), but beyond that, I'm good with the Back to Basics. I already know that wheat and corn are no no's, so that's 2 I can skip. I will check out the Pure Vita- I don't think I've heard of that one.

Oh, sweet potatoes. Darn. This one is low fat enough that I think I could feed it to both girls, too. I'll have to run it through the "actual fat" algorithm (or whatever it's called, lol) and if Rose can handle sweet potatoes, I may be able to use it in the future- thanks!

This has also helped Rose (it's kinda pricey, but we have had a 16 oz. bottle for over a year. You can use it either full strength or dilute it- directions are on the bottle. I dilute unless she's reallllly itchy): http://www.kvsupply.com/KVVet/produc...7#.UNprxHed8sw

Hi Alicia -- one thought: as this sounds rather severe for such a young puppy, has she had the DNA test for dry eye/curly coat to eliminate this as a possibility? One possible sign of DE/CC is hair that falls out in patches and the dog has irritated, itchy skin and this generally will start from puppyhood. It would be really important I think to rule this out as diet will not be the issue then, and she would need a range of specialised care over her life, if she has this.

It is very fortunate that there is now an easy DNA test to definitively diagnose or rule out this condition, so you would know right away.

Did your breeder test for this condition in both breeding dogs? About 10% of cavaliers are carriers so this is one of the important (and easy, one-off) things to test for in all breeding dogs.

I second Karlin's opinion about curly coat/dry eye as a possible connection. Curly coat cavaliers have severe skin problems, sometimes they may not have the "official" curly coat look in early puppyhood or perhaps its a mild case now....either way I think it may be worth finding out. I hope it is an allergy but better be safe than sorry especially before you drive yourself crazy trying to figure out what food works all the while not improving her condition,

Melissa
"If you don't own a dog, at least one, there is not necessarily anything wrong with you, but there may be something wrong with your life."
-Roger Caras

Thanks for the info. this is not something we have heard of and we have taken her to the vet regularly over this issue and our vet has not mentioned it either.
We will do our research. We were rather disappointed in the lack of help we got from our vet, they focused on doing testing on things we were pretty sure it wasnt (fungal diseases, mites).
Alicia